Rest Periods

Training

Rest Periods
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Now, the final thing we need to discuss in relation to resistance training in the exercise fundamentals series is the length of the rest period between sets. There is clearly a difference in performance on subsequent sets, depending on whether you rest for 30 seconds or 3 minutes. So we must tease out some of the nuance here, to allow us to fully round out our understanding of resistance training programming. 

This isn’t a hugely controversial or in-depth topic, however, to really dig into it, I am going to need to assume that you have already read our article on understanding reps, as this does cover a lot of stuff around reps that will allow you to better understand and utilise the information in this article. Our articles on RIR and RPE and tempo are also quite helpful in rounding out your knowledge of reps, and thus will allow you to better understand volume and thus how long you should be resting between your sets.

If you haven’t already, it would be incredibly helpful to also read our articles on why exercise is important, the goals of exercise, the types of exercise we have available to us, and to have a rough idea of the general exercise guidelines. It would also be helpful if you had a good understanding of why and how we use resistance training to build muscle and strength. I am also going to assume that if you intend to use this information to make better exercise programs, you have already spent some time thinking about your exercise selection and have ensured it is appropriate for your goals.

You can also visit our exercise hub for more content on exercise.

Before we get stuck in, I would just like to remind you that we offer comprehensive online coaching. So if you need help with your own exercise program or nutrition, don’t hesitate to reach out. If you are a coach (or aspiring coach) and want to learn how to coach nutrition, then consider signing up to our Nutrition Coach Certification course. We do also have an exercise program design course in the works, if you are a coach who wants to learn more about effective program design and how to coach it. We do have other courses available too.

Now, with all that out of the way, we can actually get stuck into the discussion of rest periods!

Rest Periods

The rest period is simply the time spent between sets (and you could argue, the time spent between exercises), and is an important training variable that must be considered. The rest period should be dictated by the training goal. If the goal is maximal strength then longer rest periods should be utilised, whereas training for hypertrophy would not necessarily require as long of a rest period.

This is because the nervous system takes longer than the muscular system to recover, and heavier loads activate the nervous system a lot more than lighter loads. 

But I am getting ahead of myself.

Why do we need to rest between sets in the first place?

Why Do You Need Rest Periods

This is a basic question, that surprisingly doesn’t get answered a lot. Most people just accept that they need rest periods, because they feel a bit tired after doing a set. So it is pretty intuitive that rest periods are needed. However, because the discussion is really only at this surface level understanding, people end up not fully taking advantage of rest periods.

So, understanding why you need rest periods is actually quite helpful to your understanding overall. And it isn’t even that complicated.

The first reason you need rest periods is that your muscles have just worked intensely during your last set, and they need to recover to some extent. Now, you are unlikely to see full recovery in a short rest period, as the body simply can’t fully heal up from any muscle damage that has occurred during that set.

So the recovery is less about repairing any muscle protein structures and more about recovering energetically. Muscle contractions during exercise use up adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the primary energy source for muscle activity. This ATP is generally “created” from either stored creatine phosphate or glucose/glycogen. Rest periods give your body time to replenish ATP and other energy stores like creatine phosphate, allowing you to maintain performance in subsequent sets.

anaerobic metabolism

It is the aerobic system that is restocking these stores, although muscle contraction in the context of resistance training is generally a more glycolytic activity. As a result of muscle contraction being more glycolytic, there is generally a build up of metabolites such as lactate and hydrogen. The hydrogen is what causes that burning sensation in your muscles.

Which brings us to the second reason you need rest periods. During rest periods, these metabolic byproducts are cleared from the muscles. The lactate either gets converted to pyruvate in the presence of oxygen and is then useable in the TCA cycle to create energy, or the lactate is shuttled to the liver to be converted to pyruvate via the Cori cycle. The increased hydrogen is also cleared during the rest periods, and as you have probably experienced, the burning sensation goes away quickly enough.

the cori cycle and exercise

Metabolite clearance doesn’t just happen quickly, and it does tend to take a surprisingly long time to see full clearance of the metabolites (i.e. 30+ minutes depending on the exact metabolite of interest). So you simply aren’t see complete clearance of metabolites in a short rest period between sets.

However, we do see a significant reduction in fairly short time frames. Something like 2-5 minutes of rest will see significant reductions in metabolite levels. Shorter rest periods tend to not allow for significant clearance, but this obviously depends on the amount of metabolic byproducts generated along with genetics, fitness levels and a whole host of other factors.

With incomplete metabolite clearance, fatigue does tend to be higher in subsequent sets and thus performance tends to be lower.

Now, it is not just the muscular system that needs to recover between sets. The nervous system that controls the muscles also needs to recover. This is the third reason we need to have rest periods, to allow the nervous system to recover.

Neurotransmitters, such as acetylcholine, which are crucial to muscle contraction are resynthesised and replenished during rest periods. Enzymes break down used neurotransmitters, and their components are recycled for future use. Synaptic vesicles, which store neurotransmitters, are reformed and refilled at the synaptic terminals.

Ion balance also needs to be restored to allow for muscle contraction. After nerve impulses (action potentials), neurons need to restore their resting membrane potential. This is achieved by actively pumping sodium (Na⁺) ions out of the cell and potassium (K⁺) ions into the cell using the sodium-potassium pump (Na⁺/K⁺-ATPase). Excess calcium ions (Ca²⁺) that entered the neuron during neurotransmitter release are actively transported out of the cell or sequestered into internal stores.

This all needs to occur to allow subsequent sets to be high quality. Nervous system recovery does tend to take a little bit longer than muscular recovery, and anybody who has done very heavy reps can attest to this. The body can feel ready to go relatively quickly, but the nervous system just takes a bit longer. This is difficult to describe, but if you have felt it, you know exactly what I mean.

Finally, rest periods are also required to regain mental focus. While people often forget this, lifting weights is actually quite a skill. You have to coordinate a lot of movement, both to lift the weights and to stabilise your body and joints. You can’t be daydreaming while lifting heavy weights, and as a result, there is a certain amount of mental fatigue generated. Rest periods provide a mental break, which helps you to maintain focus and concentration during your subsequent sets.

Ultimately, you need to rest to allow subsequent sets to be the highest quality they can be. Shorter rest periods, generally means fewer effective reps across a workout. However, excessively long rest periods increase the likelihood of your cooling down and getting out of the rhythm of the exercise.

So, how long should your rest periods be?

How Long Should Your Rest Periods Be?

This is a complicated question to answer, as people have different goals with their training programs. However, if we take it that we want to build muscle and/or strength, then we probably want to get close to “full recovery” between sets. This allows us to maximise the total amount of effective reps we can accumulate across a workout.

multiple sets (volume)

Merely doing multiple sets isn’t going to lead to more results, if that extra volume is just junk volume. It needs to be high quality volume, and resting sufficiently between sets allows you to ensure that subsequent sets are high quality.

Full recovery of the muscles and nervous system likely doesn’t occur for 48-72 hours, however, for the purposes of being able to perform at a high level in subsequent sets, we likely only need 2-5 minutes to see “full recovery”.

  • Longer rest periods (2-5 minutes) between sets are recommended to allow both the muscular and nervous systems to recover adequately.
  • Moderate rest periods (60-90 seconds) are often used, although there may be incomplete recovery as a result.
  • Short rest periods (<60 seconds) generally don’t allow for a high degree of recovery between sets, and performance on subsequent sets will almost certainly be compromised.

There may be some differences in recovery between exercises, and generally, exercises that use more muscle mass or require more joints to move, require longer periods of time to recover. While isolation exercises for small muscle groups may actually recover quite quickly.

So, don’t take the 2-5 minute guideline for “full recovery” to be gospel. It is just a rough guideline.

You must also factor in that sometimes incomplete recovery is the goal. For protocols that are trying to target the metabolic stress vector of muscle growth, short rest periods with incomplete clearance of metabolites may be the goal. Similarly, some athletes trying to build localised muscular tolerance to acidosis may use incomplete recovery.

Different rest periods are better for different jobs, and there is no perfect, generalisable rest period (although if you have specific goals, we can give a specific rest period recommendation).

Ultimately, the exact rest period that makes the most sense, depends on the specific goal. However, it is important to at least standardise your rest periods across all your sets of an exercise and from workout to workout. You can’t compare workouts and accurately track progress if one week you took 3-minute rest periods and then the next week you took 1-minute rest periods. To accurately compare and track progress, there must be some standardisation. Don’t just chop and change them from workout to workout.

Rest Periods In Practice

While rest periods are an important training variable to consider, the discussion of them isn’t that in-depth or difficult to understand. In general, a 2-3 minute rest period is best practice. Shorter and longer rest periods have their place, but the default should be somewhere in the range of 2-3 minutes. Long enough so the next set of reps can be performed at a high level, but not so long that the individual starts to cool down.

Rest PeriodBenefitsPitfallsWhen You Would Use
<60 secondsPotentially beneficial for muscle endurance, increasing workout density and calorie burn. Increased metabolic stress on the muscles.Generally insufficient rest to allow for recovery for the next set to be high quality. Potentially compromises strength and power output in subsequent sets. Potentially increased injury risk due to fatigue. It can make sense when supersetting antagonists, trying to target metabolic stress, or training small muscles. It can also make sense for circuit style training, and muscular endurance-focused workouts.
60-120 secondsSufficient recovery to allow for decent-quality work to be performed that promotes muscular hypertrophy, strength gains, and endurance improvements.Some loss of metabolic stress compared to shorter rest periods.Hypertrophy-focused resistance training, and moderate intensity workouts. 
120-300 secondsAllows near-complete replenishment of energy stores for high quality performance in subsequent sets. Potentially reduced overall metabolic stress compared to shorter rest periods. It does potentially make workouts quite a bit longer.Strength or hypertrophy focused resistance training.
>300 secondsAllows for complete recovery and thus maximises strength potential and force production.Long rest periods will lead to longer workout durations. When rest periods get too long, you do run the risk of “cooling down” between sets and actually seeing a decline in performance on subsequent sets.Very effective for highly neurologically demanding workouts. Thus it is beneficial for strength and powerlifting focused workouts, and maximal strength testing.

However, these are just guidelines. The rest intervals we employ should also take into account the range of motion of an exercise, the complexity of an exercise and the amount of muscle mass recruited. I don’t think anyone would say the recovery between a set of heavy squats and that of a set of calf raises would be the same. More complex exercises also required a longer recovery period.

The tempo of the exercise and overall TUT must also be taken into account when deciding on rest intervals, with longer TUT likely requiring longer rest periods (unless the goal is to reach failure sooner by virtue of incomplete recovery between sets).

The rest period allows for recovery between sets, and this can be manipulated depending on the goal. We can use rest intervals to induce greater cell swelling and metabolic stress to a particular muscle group, and as mentioned previously this is a mechanism for growth.

the mechanisms of hypertrophy, mechanical tension, muscle damage and metabolic stress

By limiting the rest period between sets, we can get incomplete clearance of metabolites and blood from that muscle, which despite what it sounds like, is actually potentially beneficial for inducing muscle growth. I would, however, only use that method once the heavier, well-rested, straight-set, progressive overload stuff has been performed. Using incomplete rest periods likely just leads to less weight being used, and thus less progressive overload over time. 

If we are really focused on improving our strength, then we likely want to maximise the amount of time between sets, as this will allow us to be more recovered going into the next set. The major downside of longer rest periods is that it just takes more time to complete a given number of sets.

A nice little trick for those who are stuck for time and need to improve the amount of work they can perform in a given workout (the density of a workout) is to pair antagonistic (opposing) muscles. This will allow a shorter rest period to be used as you will be recovering when you are performing an exercise for the antagonist.

This likely isn’t the best approach for strength gain, as there is still some systemic rather than localised recovery that needs to occur. But it is a nice middle-ground approach. You can also work on remedial work that is low effort during the recovery period, as it isn’t likely to interfere with subsequent set performance.

So, in general, you will likely use rest periods of 2-3 minutes in your program, although the occasional use of shorter or longer rest periods can make sense. This window of rest will likely be enough time to allow you to enter the next set with similar levels of performance to the last, which is ultimately our goal when choosing rest periods.

You may have read online that shorter rest periods are better for muscle building, as this is a prevalent idea in bodybuilding circles. This logic is based on 1) the sensation of a greater burn and more fatigue, and 2) the hormonal response to training. However, the former is not necessarily a proxy for greater muscle building, and the latter doesn’t seem to have any meaningful effect either. 

Instead, the rest period should serve to facilitate the performance of the next set. If it is too short, the fatigue from the last set will affect your ability to perform. If it is too long, you may “cool down” both physically and psychologically, reducing your vigour going into the next set, but it will also prolong your workouts more than is necessary. 

So, very simply, the rest period will primarily serve as a means of facilitating performance. If you do find at any stage that a rest period is either too short or too long, you can feel free to adjust as necessary to meet that goal.

You also don’t necessarily need to time every rest period, but rather use it as a guide. In the beginning, it can be helpful to time yourself, as you may be surprised at how short or long your current rest periods are. But once you get a good idea of how long you should be waiting between sets, you don’t necessarily need to use a timer to keep the rest periods perfectly consistent.

If you feel like you haven’t recovered enough between sets, you can simply rest for longer (unless the goal is incomplete recovery). However, if you do rest for longer, this should be noted and it should be used to inform your future progressions. You don’t want to fall into the trap of “progressing” by slowly taking longer between your sets. You want to keep your rest periods somewhat consistent.

Rest Periods Conclusion

Rest periods aren’t that difficult to understand, however, many people still make some fundamental mistakes with their use of rest periods. In general, we want to try and prioritise (near) complete recovery between sets, as this allows us to maximise the number of effective reps that we can perform across a workout. However, sometimes incomplete rest can make sense.

As a result, we generally recommend that for most people, a 2-3 minute rest period is best practice. Shorter or longer rest periods can be used, but the default should be 2-3 minutes.

As with everything, there is always more to learn, and we haven’t even begun to scratch the surface with all this stuff. However, if you are interested in staying up to date with all our content, we recommend subscribing to our newsletter and bookmarking our free content page. We do have a lot of content on how to design your own exercise program on our exercise hub.

If you would like more help with your training (or nutrition), we do also have online coaching spaces available.

We also recommend reading our foundational nutrition article, along with our foundational articles on sleep and stress management, if you really want to learn more about how to optimise your lifestyle. If you want even more free information on exercise, you can follow us on Instagram, YouTube or listen to the podcast, where we discuss all the little intricacies of exercise.

Finally, if you want to learn how to coach nutrition, then consider our Nutrition Coach Certification course. We do also have an exercise program design course in the works, if you are a coach who wants to learn more about effective program design and how to coach it. We do have other courses available too. If you don’t understand something, or you just need clarification, you can always reach out to us on Instagram or via email.

The previous article in this series is about Training Volume and the next article in this series is a Review of Resistance Training Guidelines, if you are interested in continuing to learn about exercise program design. You can also go to our exercise hub to find more exercise content.

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Paddy Farrell
www.triagemethod.com

Hey, I'm Paddy!

I am a coach who loves to help people master their health and fitness. I am a personal trainer, strength and conditioning coach, and I have a degree in Biochemistry and Biomolecular Science. I have been coaching people for over 10 years now.

When I grew up, you couldn't find great health and fitness information, and you still can't really. So my content aims to solve that!

I enjoy training in the gym, doing martial arts and hiking in the mountains (around Europe, mainly). I am also an avid reader of history, politics and science. When I am not in the mountains, exercising or reading, you will likely find me in a museum.